The girl gave her head a little turn. “Do you think he would accommodate me?” she asked.

He looked her over critically as she had first looked at him. “It’s a dangerous business answering for Collister,” he ventured; “but maybe if I asked him he would.”

“Well, you are bigoty,” she asserted. “I can’t noways see what there is betwixt you. Why, they say that whilst you’re working he comes out in the field, an’ bosses you under a umbrelly; an”’—a laugh carried her words along like leaves on dancing water—“an’ that he keeps a stool stropped to his back, ready to set down on whenever he pleases. Is it true—‘hones’ truth’?”

A great mirth shook Collister’s man from head to foot. “Such a figure—such a figure as the old boy cuts!” he gasped. “Sometimes I ask him if he’ll keep his stool strapped on when he goes a-courting; and he says maybe so—it’ll be so handy to hitch along closer to the young lady.” Without thinking, he illustrated with the cracker-box as he spoke. “And as for the umbrella, I certainly ain’t the one to object to that; for, you see, when the sun’s right hot he holds it over me.”

He leaned half forward as he spoke, smiling at her. It is hard to tell exactly when a new acquaintance ceases to be a stranger; but as the girl on the doorstep smiled in answer she was unexpectedly aware that the shrewd, kindly, furrowed face of this young man who worked for Collister was something which she had known for a long, long time. It seemed as familiar as the scent of pine needles and myrtle or as the shafts of blue, smoke-stained sunlight between the brown trunks of the pine trees in the fall, or as the feathery outline of green pine-tops against the dreamy intensity of a Southern sky; and when all this has been said of a girl who lives in the “pineys” there is no necessity for saying more. She gave a little nervous laugh.

The man began talking again. “It ain’t such foolery as you would think, his wearing the stool and carrying the umbrella,” he said. “This is the way he reasons it out, he says. In the first place there’s the sun; that’s a pretty good reason. But what started it was a blazing day up North, when he was hustling four deals at once; a man would need a head the size of a barrel to keep that sort of thing going for long, and Collister has just an ordinary head no bigger than mine. Well, the upshot of it was that he had a sunstroke, and was laid up a month; and then he reckoned up the day’s business, and what he’d gained on one deal he’d lost on another, so that he came out even to a cent—queer, wasn’t it?—with just the experience of a sunstroke to add to his stock-in-trade. Then he bought himself an umbrella and a stool, and began to take life fair and easy. Easy going is my way too; that’s why we get along together.”

There was a jar of candy on a shelf behind him and above his head, and turning, he reached up a long arm and took it down. It was translucent stick candy with red stripes round it—just such candy as every fortunate child knew twenty years ago, and some know still. In the piney woods it has not been superseded as a standard of delight, and the children expect to receive it gratuitously after any extensive purchase. Near the coast, where Creole words have spread, it is asked for by a queer sweet name—lagnappe (something thrown in for good measure). The man who worked for Collister handed the jar across to the girl, making her free of it with a gesture.

“Do you reckon Mr. Collister would want me to take some?” she asked, poising her slender brown hand on the edge of the jar. “You know, they say that when he first come hyar, an’ the children asked him for lagnappe, he pretended not to onderstan’ ’em, and said he was sorry, but he hadn’t got it yet in stock. Is that true?”

“Yes,” the man answered; “that’s true.”

“Well, did he onderstan’?” she asked.

He lifted his shoulders in a way he had learned in the South. “To be sure,” he said. “I told him at the time that it was a mean thing to do, but he said he simply couldn’t help himself; young ones kept running